


three times Leia Organa got a black eye

by ATMachine (orphan_account)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 05:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12787683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ATMachine
Summary: Not all mirrors are glass.Based on the August 1975 third draft script.





	three times Leia Organa got a black eye

_for Khris_

**i.**

 

The first time is in the dungeons of Alderaan.

Leia Organa, princess of the royal house of Organa Major, is sent to the Empire’s most secure dungeon for taking part in the treasonous activities of the Rebel Alliance.

The prison of Alderaan floats high in the clouds of that gaseous world, a city balanced on the head of a pin; a heavenly city whose spires hold the torments of hell.

Here she loses her home planet, and her virginity, and her innocence.

Between torture sessions Darth Vader brings her to the command center of the prison complex, to talk by hologram with Governor Tarkin, aboard the orbital superweapon whose plans she had been carrying to safety.

 _Had been carrying_ – and now, are they in General Kenobi’s hands, or someone else’s, or lost forever in the desert sands of Sullust? Any of a thousand things could go wrong, and that would be the end of the Rebel Alliance.

Not that it matters now to her father, and mother, and everyone else on Organa Major. What does a scattering of space dust care for the tribulations of the living?

 

Her robes, once white, are now dingy gray, tattered and torn; they hang from her shoulder, and one breast peeks out at the world. Her soles are black with the grime of the duracrete hallways. Her shoes and undergarments were lost the first time a trio of soldiers came into her cell.

Her nose is broken, and her right eye is swollen shut. It throbs painfully, and is probably a shocking shade of purple. Not that she can tell without a mirror.

She spends the time between torture sessions unaware now, her mind blanked out by the waves from a neural disruptor. Her jailers claim it is to prevent her brain from burning out; she suspects they are preparing new torments that require her to be unconscious.

And immobilized; the neural disruptor on the wall of her cramped cell is accompanied by a force-field generator that can levitate her four feet off the ground, even turn her upside-down. This, too, is seeing increasing use. She wonders if they intend to drill into her head with needles, extracting her liquefied brain fluid ounce by fluid ounce.

She never finds out. Because, unexpectedly, her mirror arrives.

The control box on the wall of her cell explodes in a shower of sparks, and consciousness returns with a _wham_ as she plunges upside-down into a pair of shaggy gray arms, and gazes through her good eye at the mirror standing on the ceiling in front of her.

He’s shorter than stormtrooper average, with shaggy blond hair in a bowl cut to mirror her own; big blue eyes that are kindly and warm, with none of the cold flintiness her own have taken on in recent days. Angelic, one might call him.

The mirror speaks. “I’m Luke Starkiller. I’m here to rescue you.”

 

**ii.**

 

The second time is in the prisons of Bespin.

Three years ago the Death Star blew up; three years ago she lost her family, and gained new friends.

Luke Starkiller, the wide-eyed, angelic farmboy from Sullust (or Utapau, as the natives call it in sarcastic jest), who looks so uncannily like her, and whose kindly nature is such that she can hardly believe he’s real rather than a holovid character. Han Solo, the roguish pirate with contacts in every dive and slumlet, whose charm would be much more attractive if he weren’t always coming on to her.

And General Kenobi, the aged Jedi Knight whom, despite her father’s tales, she didn’t really believe existed until she laid eyes on him. Yet for all the myths surrounding him, Kenobi is flesh and blood, and bears the scars of battle; his right hand is a prosthetic, and he still walks with a limp from the wound Vader gave him on Alderaan.

The four of them stay together; at least, until Hoth.

In the chaos of the Empire’s assault, they are forced to split up; Leia and Han leave together on the _Millennium Falcon_ , while Luke and Ben Kenobi head off in a two-person cargo transport.

Trouble is, as they leave the hangar, some of the stormtroopers let fly with an assault cannon, and damage their main hyperdrive beyond repair.

The backup hyperdrive still works, but it’s only for emergencies; getting anywhere beyond one or two star systems away would take years. As it is, they have a three-month layover to the Anoat system and the watery world of Bespin. Han says he’s got a contact there, Lando Calrissian, who runs a fishery and sea-mining operation there.

Three months alone with Captain Solo and his pet Wookiee.

Two of these months are filled with his incessant come-ons. Solo, that is, not Chewbacca; although she has to wonder about the proclivities of any being that counts Han Solo as its best friend.

She finally explains to Han what happened on Alderaan, and he backs off.

The third month is much more peaceful, by comparison.

 

The city of Bespin floats just above the water’s surface. The view would be lovely, if it weren’t raining almost all the time.

Not that she gets much of a chance to see it.

Lando Calrissian welcomes them with open arms… and invites them to dine with his other dinner guest, Darth Vader.

Leia Organa, Princess of Organa Major, wets herself.

 

The prison cells on Bespin are grimier and more makeshift than the dungeons of Alderaan. Doubtless they weren’t designed with Imperial standards in mind.

But Vader and his henchmen make do.

Again torture; again rape; again the agony that threatens to leave her a gibbering wreck.

She never got her nose reset after Alderaan; she’d wanted the scars, to remind her. Well, now it’s broken again, and looks more like a duck’s beak than a human nose.

Her right eye, again, is swollen shut. And it _hurts_. She hopes the vision in it is okay.

Clothes? All gone. At least she doesn’t have to keep wearing that soiled dress.

 

Once again, her mirror saves her.

Luke Starkiller, the farmboy from Utapau, arrives to break them out of jail. She’s half expecting it; Vader has been explicit about using them as bait to trap Luke.

What she _isn’t_ expecting is that Luke is accompanied by Lando, who got them into this mess.

As Lando shepherds them all back to the _Falcon_ , Luke goes off in another direction. His face bears an expression she’s never seen before, one which feels somehow _wrong_ on his facial features: a frown of barely controlled rage.

She tells him to be careful. She knows he won’t be.

Everyone has to lose their innocence sometime.

 

On the _Falcon_ , Leia gets an icepack for her eye. It still _hurts_ , dammit, and she hopes to get the swelling down enough to open it and check for damage.

Then she hears Luke, talking to her, as if whispering in her ear.

_Leia._

And she knows: they’ve got to go back.

So much for innocence.

 

Afterward, on the medical frigate back at the Rebel fleet, she learns more of the story; how Luke lost his hand and nearly his life dueling Vader, but was saved by Ben Kenobi, who stowed away on Luke’s transport.

Ben Kenobi, who knew what Luke was likely to do, and followed him in secret.

Ben Kenobi, who sacrificed his life so his pupil could get away.

She is mad at Luke for getting Ben killed: but even more so at Ben, for letting things come to that pass in the first place.

Why did that foolish old man let Luke face Vader when he was so hopelessly outmatched?

She does not know.

 

The medtech droid tells her that her right eye is fragile. Another good blow to it like the beating she got on Bespin, and she’ll probably end up blind.

Bacta can only do so much; it can fix scars and heal abrasions, but repairing eyes is far beyond its power.

She settles for having the droid fix her nose. It hurts, but not for long.

 

After Luke gets out of surgery, she goes down to see him. Her anger at him melts away, with a jolt of sadness, when she notices the droid arm that now protrudes from his right sleeve. The Alliance has precious little synthflesh, and doesn’t waste it on things like this.

“Hey,” she says, trying to keep the concern out of her voice, and failing.

“Hey,” he says, and for a moment the farmboy grin is back on his face. The rage that possessed him on Bespin is gone now, and with it the sense of _wrongness_.

“I, uh… I guess we don’t match anymore,” Luke says, cradling his new arm with his fleshy left hand. “Sorry about that.”

She laughs. His face registers puzzlement.

“I’ve never told you what happened on my tenth birthday, have I?”

Luke shakes his head.

“As a Princess of a royal house, you’re expected to start training early with all sorts of weapons. Self-defense, you understand. Blasters, vibroblades… even lightsabers.”

Her voice chokes, but she goes on. “I was training with real sabers for the first time, and the combat droid… it got in a lucky blow, and took off the front of my saber hilt. But it didn’t stop there.”

She flexes her left hand, the one whose fingernails she never has to trim. “Long story short, I got a prosthetic left arm, and was taken off lightsabers for the rest of my training.”

He stares at her for a moment. “All this time…”

She reflects his grin back at him. “Sorry, farmboy. Afraid we still match.”

 

**iii.**

 

The third time is in the Palace of Condawn.

Since Bespin, Luke has begun teaching her a little of the ways of the Jedi, now that he knows she can sense the Force: he has taught her some of what he learned from Ben, and some of what he has read in the books and notes Ben left behind.

She learns fitfully, haltingly, like a child learning to walk. She struggles to move objects with her mind, but she sees visions with startling clarity, like a reflection in still water. And she begins making progress on something Luke found in one of Ben’s old notebooks, an ancient Jedi art called “Battle Meditation,” which can bend minds and bodies and even the air around one to one’s will.

She does not, however, so much as touch a lightsaber.

And then, after a scant few months, the training is interrupted.

The Rebels’ spies have learned of a massive Imperial construction project: two Death Stars to replace the one that was shattered over Yavin. They’re being built in orbit over Coruscant, the Imperial capital; protected from all attack by massive shield generators, password-protected, on the planet surface.

And the passwords aren’t kept on Coruscant itself. No, they’re in the heart of the prison complex of Alderaan. Where security has been greatly tightened since her escape four years ago.

So it has to be a covert operation, with her and Luke dressing up as Imperial officers. She dyes her hair, and he wears an eyepatch, so their famous faces, which appear so eerily similar on the Imperial wanted posters, won’t be recognized.

That plan hardly lasts long enough to get them into the computer center.

It quickly turns into a firefight, with her holding off guards as Luke frantically downloads data from the computers into R2-D2’s memory banks. They get the passwords. But getting _out_ again is something else.

In the end, she makes the hardest decision of her life.

She kisses Luke once – for luck, as she said years ago, swinging across a chasm in this very city – and then charges toward the onrushing ranks of skeletal-armored troopers.

Then a stun bolt blasts her, and she sinks blessedly into darkness.

 

When she opens her eyes, it is Vader who greets her.

To her surprise, he unmasks before her, and she gazes upon the true face of Darth Vader.

Or rather, Zeno, eldest child of Anakin Starkiller, and one-time apprentice of Jedi Knight Ben Kenobi.

Now she understands why old Ben let Luke face Vader. This was a failure he could not confess, a lie he could not shatter, without destroying his own place in Luke’s heart. He would have gone from a revered mentor to just a man, weak and old and fallible.

And that would have been something the prideful old Jedi could not have borne.

She begins to understand why the Jedi fell; their failure was born of hubris, of refusal to face up to the world as it truly was, of masks of self-image that were too important to discard.

They believed they were the custodians of the Republic. And they were. Right up until the citizens of the Republic turned on them and let the Emperor and his new Sith Lords kill them all without batting an eye.

All this Vader tells her, _shows_ her, with the power of the latent Force connection that until recently she didn't know she had. Little by little, she learns under his tutelage to wield powers the Jedi had disdained to use.

Old Ben knew these powers, Vader tells her. He was as curious about the Dark Side as Vader himself, as curious as Leia is now. But he hoarded their mastery for himself, kept them from his pupils. Vader had had to teach himself in secret, and eventually brought down the Jedi Order with his forbidden knowledge.

Here, at Condawn, the Blood Moon of Coruscant, on this world of fire and lava, was the last great battle of the Jedi Rebellion. Here Vader was burned and left dependent on life support by the lava; here the last of the Jedi Order perished, among them Anakin Starkiller. Thus why Vader built his palace here: this was the place that made him, the site of his greatest defeat and his greatest victory.

And Leia Organa, Darth Vader’s greatest student, at last builds her own lightsaber.

 

When Luke arrives, he comes alone.

A battle rages in the sky above them: a Rebel fleet fights desperately against an Imperial armada, supposedly dispersed throughout the galaxy in pursuit of them, in reality kept right here over Coruscant.

She told Vader what they had planned. The Rebels walked right into the trap of her own making.

Now, while the Alliance fights for its life overhead, and Han Solo infiltrates the sewers of Coruscant in a desperate mission to reach the Death Stars’ shield generators in the Emperor’s Palace, Luke Starkiller comes to confront his brother and his doppelganger.

She meets him with red blade lifted high.

They fight.

 

The odds are two against one. Even for a skilled Jedi, facing two opponents of equal caliber is not an easy situation to come out of alive.

But even in the grip once again of tremendous rage, Luke has an ace up his sleeve.

She never even sees it coming.

 

Luke’s lightsaber blade – golden, not blue like the one he lost on Bespin – slashes toward her chest, and she moves to counter the blow.

But then he reverses the blade, and moves the hilt toward her face. In the split second before it connects, she realizes what he’s doing –

– and then the hilt of Luke’s lightsaber comes crashing down on her right eye, and she sags to her knees with the pain of it.

Tears and blood leak out from behind her hand, held clutched to her ruined eye; her lightsaber rolls across the floor and off a catwalk, forgotten in her haze of pain.

Soon, Luke has disarmed Vader, cutting off his brother’s hand just as Zeno Starkiller did to him back on Bespin.

Overhead, the shield generators drop, and two Death Stars explode.

In the Imperial Palace on Coruscant, Han Solo and his hand-picked Rebel guard hold the Emperor at gunpoint. Sate Pestage, erstwhile ruler of the galaxy, opts to die rather than surrender, and takes three soldiers with him before he falls.

The Light Side has triumphed.

But Vader is not defeated.

 

When Luke’s battle madness subsides, he turns his back on Vader, looking once again to Leia, his double and his mirror.

This is a mistake.

Behind Luke, Vader rises.

From his good arm bolts of lightning shoot out, pinning the blond Jedi to the floor.

Luke screams as if the flesh were melting from his bones. As she listens, his howls of pain bring back memories of Bespin, of Alderaan, of her birthday ten years ago.

She never wants to hear those screams again.

Later, she doesn’t remember crossing the distance between herself and Vader; she remembers only the pain of colliding with the black armor, of sending them both hurling toward the great window on one wall of the throne room, crashing through the panes and down to the lava below.

She does not know it, but right now she wears the facial expression she has seen on Luke’s face twice now, the expression that seemed so _wrong_ on him.

On her, it seems a natural fit.

Her face is a mask of rage.

 

She barely has time, before she hits the lava, to begin reciting in her mind the litanies of Battle Meditation.

She had wondered why Ben never told Luke about this practice, given how powerful it seemed. Was he afraid, perhaps, of losing Luke the same way he did Vader? Was he afraid to let his student become as powerful as he himself?

Was Vader _right_?

She decides, in the blink of an eye, it doesn’t matter. The old Jedi Order is dead, as are the Sith.

Only Luke is left.

And then she hits the lava, and her world becomes fire.

 

She floats out of the lava naked, hairless, her clothes and hair singed away by the heat, her eye blinded by Luke’s cunning blow, but otherwise unharmed.

She falls to earth on the rocks just below the shattered window of Vader’s throne room, and only then becomes conscious of the overwhelming heat.

Luke is there, and helps her stand up on unsteady legs.

The sharp stones under her feet hurt as she walks back to the landing pad, but she doesn’t care.

She’s alive, and Luke is alive, and the Alliance has won.

The last two Jedi have finally found a measure of happiness.

 

At the party on the command frigate the next day, Han shows up with a paramour, a green-skinned woman with an auburn mohawk of hair. He introduces her as Sana, a saloon-keeper on Coruscant; to hear him talk, she was an old friend whose help was crucial in getting his team past security in the Imperial Palace.

Leia suspects that, as ever with Han, there’s more to the story. But she won’t begrudge him his happiness. Who knows, she tells herself, things might even work out between them.

Luke walks over to her, fresh from a conversation with Wedge (he must be Force-sensitive or something, she guesses, to have survived so many battles), and kisses her. She kisses him back, doing something with her tongue she suspects nobody on Sullust would admit knowing about.

She doesn’t look like him now, she knows: her hair is gone, maybe forever, and she’s lost an eye, and she told the med droid not to bother resetting her nose after she broke it a third time in the duel.

The mirror is well and truly shattered.

In its place, there are two separate people.


End file.
